Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Under the headline "Only a Eurosceptic Tory Party can win a majority" in the Telegraph today poor, deluded Douglas Carswell once again sees the world through the filter of his own paranoia. He and his obsessive single-issue predecessors have done untold damage to his Party and the country. The divides on Europe in the Conservative party haven't gone away just because their current leader has judged that his own survival (an improbable event anyway) requires him to grab at the Referendum straw.

Mr Cameron, informed as Mr Carswell has never been by the cool realities of power, knows that for Britain to leave the EU would be a disaster - and has said so. The majority of his Cabinet colleagues also know this to be true. But those men who made life hell for John Major, some still banging on as they ever did, and their faux-patriot successors don't care. They dangle the prospect of Britain being better off "Out" as if all of our social, economic and other problems would be solved if we hauled up the drawbridge and travelled back in time to 1955.

Britain has its problems but only to look outward at one aspect of how we operate as a Nation state (our place as a partner in the EU) is myopia of the worst kind. Indeed, as Ireland has shown and as Spain, Greece and Portugal will also soon demonstrate, Europeanism is not the problem but a key part of the solution. When the history of these febrile times comes to be written it will be the leaders like Angela Merkel who eschew petty nationalism and create pan-national solutions who will be seen as the heroes. And the likes of Douglas Carswell will just be "Douglas Who?" - remembered (if at all) only as that irritating little sharp-toothed terrier who once snapped ineffectually at the heels of giants.